this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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I will never understand the personal demoralization and intellectual dishonesty required for an individual to defend the bloody and counterrevolutionary legacy of Stalinism. There is not a trace of anticommunism in legitimate Trotskyism. Stalin, on the contrary, as the agency of imperialism in the workers movement, murdered hundreds of thousands of communist revolutionaries and Old Bolsheviks, and promoted a program of class collaboration with imperialism, which led to repeated disaster. The physical anhilalation of revolutionary cadres was devastating to Marxist political culture. The damage Stalin did to the reputation of communism in the workers movement is incalculable.
You want to talk about the revolutionary role of the peasentry at a time now in history when the world peasant population has shrunk to a fraction of its size and the proletarian working class makes up the majority of the world population? Pathetic. Trotsky's theory, adopted by Lenin in April 1917, of the proletariat leading the peasantry in revolution to establish a socialist dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry was absolutely correct, as demonstrated in the victory of October 1917. Returning to the old pre-April 1917 formulation of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was a reactionary step away from the program of world socialist revolution, which strengthened the position of imperialism and the comprador bourgeoisie.
Trotsky correctly predicted the result of Stalinist politics, which would be the restoration of capitalism by the initiative of the Stalinist bureaucracies, as was carried out by Deng in China in 1989 and Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in 1991. The political base of Stalinism is nationalism and class collaboration.
"Stalinism" largely refers to "Socialism in One Country," which won out democratically over Permanent Revolution. This proved correct, socialism was solidified in the USSR, and Trotsky's bitter jealousy turned him towards organized terrorism against the Soviet Union, and calls to overthrow the Soviet Union. Trotsky is the epitome of a wrecker. Stalin was never a collaborator with imperialism, unless you mean allying with the imperialist west against Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. You're not going to find me finger-wagging siding with the West against Nazi Germany, that was absolutely the right move.
Yes, Trots that uphold Trotskyism when the peasantry is increasingly phased out in favor of industrialized agriculture are indeed silly. Trotskyism's relevance was in the theoretical debates in the early Soviet Union, then proven false, and should have been forgotten then and there. Instead, it survives in the west, as it serves as an anticommunist form of Marxism. Western Marxists love purity and martrydom, but hate real revolution.
Trotsky predicted nothing correctly. Trotsky predicted that the peasantry would turn against the proletariat, which was the sole basis of Permanent Revolution. The liberalization under Gorbachev was not an inevitability. Deng's reforms were not a betrayal of socialism, either, they stabilized growth while maintaining socialism.
Trots are, in theory and in practice, "left" anticommunists. They are useful for imperialism as they promote the anti-AES narrative among the left, harming solidarity and siding with the global north against the global south.
Arguably it wasn’t carried out in the USSR because it happened after Yeltsin’s coup dissolved it. One might argue that Gorbachev’s Perestroika would have inevitably led to that outcome, but we’ll never really know.
It hasn’t been carried out in China. China’s bourgeoisie don’t collaborate with the Chinese state so much as take orders from it. Previously:
Also what “imperialism” was Stalin involved with, and who were the “hundreds of thousands of communist revolutionaries and Old Bolsheviks” that Stalin murdered?
Your inability to understand a thing is not a particularly good argument against it, neither is anything else you've said here